Horacetalk

I've posted the Greek text and horrible Loeb translation of Theocritus 2 on the class website.  Some other resources on Greek magic:

Arcana Mundi, ed. Georg Luck
Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, ed. Hans Dieter Betz
Ancient Greek Love Magic, Christopher Faraone

For a good basic bibliography, see Diotima's collection of references HERE.

It isn't Horace--it's Catullus--but here is a great posting on Mary Beard's blog (A Don's Life) about a civil suit alleging sexist behavior by a powerful financier who just happens to have a degree in classics from Oxford.  The Catullus evidence attracted the attention of NPR, which had a segment today featuring an interview with Mary Beard.  About half of her replies were bleeped out--you'll see why when you read the post.


Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo: what was Catullus on about?


Oliver Nicholson is a regular commenter on Mary's blog, btw.

Sometime before Monday, I'd like to hear your thoughts about the way HORACE seems to define 'lyric' in the Odes.  We've looked at earlier ancient evidence (Harvey) and later ancient evidence (Cairns) for the different types of lyric poems--does Horace seem to recognize these differences?  Does he maintain a consistent picture of himself as 'lyric poet' throughout the first three books?

CATCHWORD : first word of the next page placed just below the last line of the preceding page, an obsolete practice. Catchwords were for the printers, not the readers, to ensure that the signatures had been properly folded and stacked; the printer only had to make sure each catchword matched the first word on the following page as he flipped through the text. These are often useful in collating an early printed book in which page numbers are sometimes incorrect or repeated (mispaginated).

From Bauman Rare Books:
http://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-book-collecting/glossary.aspx

From Simon Goldhill's review of Ruth Webb's book on ekphrasis and rhetorical theory, BMCR 2009.10.3

"For some time now, there has been a profound disagreement rising to the surface in Classical Studies, and this admirable book should bring it to a head. The swelling row, sometimes conducted in rather hissy tones, has a specific casus belli, but the implications are extremely broad indeed; and, since they concern the very status of rhetoric as a training in the ancient world, they touch all classicists, especially in the literary, artistic and cultural historical spheres. Let me try first to say what I think the disagreement is and why it matters before I turn to explain why this book may consequently be important for the development of our field.

It is best to start with the casus belli. Some of the most interesting work in recent years on classical literature, both in relation to the arts and in relation to narrative, has focused on ekphrasis. It is invidious to single out particular works, but Don Fowler's work on description and narrative has been particularly influential, as has Jas Elsner's on Roman viewing, or Froma Zeitlin's on the theatre, or a string of fine studies of Hellenistic epigram from Britain, America, France, Germany and Italy. "Art and Text", and "Description and Narrative" have become major fields where sophistication of approach has gone hand in hand with fine, detailed literary analysis. Throughout this work, the term ekphrasis is generally used, with varying degrees of self-conscious historicization, to mean the verbal description of a work of art, from a painting to a city--and there is a specific genealogy of such descriptions starting from Homer's Shield of Achilles, moving through Hesiod's Shield of Heracles to fifth-century theatre and on through Hellenistic epigrams, epic and pastoral to Latin examples--the Aeneid and Catullus 64 in prime place--right up to Christian and Byzantine material, especially descriptions of church buildings. One such ekphrasis caused Libanius (1.41) to have a critical fit against the unfortunate Bemarchios for rambling on about pillars, trellised courts and the like. A cultural history of a discourse of viewing has been articulated for which ekphrasis in this sense has been integral and essential.

The trouble is that the ancient sense of the word ekphrasis does not refer solely or primarily to the rhetorical description of a work of art. Its use in a technical sense in the rhetorical treatises of the Roman Empire refers to an emotional style of writing, which brings a scene to life before the eyes of a listener. It is closely related to enargeia. The examples that the rhetorical handbooks give, suggest battles, seasons, storms, plagues, as paradigmatic subjects for student exercises. The test-cases are usually prose and from the historians or rhetoricians rather than the poets (with the obvious exception of Homer). So some critics have responded to the contemporary work on ekphrasis as part of a discourse of viewing by declaring that such usage ignores or is ignorant of ancient usage; that it invents a genre where none is recognized in the ancient world; and consequently distorts the ancient understanding of description as a mode, which has a psychological and rhetorical framing that must be determinative. Rhetorical training is the grounding of Greco-Roman intellectual comprehension of things, and thus is would be rash indeed to ignore such a frame. The phrase--and by implication the category of--ekphrastic epigram, declares one critic in nominalist fervour, is a modern invention.

Now there can be no informed classicist who would not agree that the study of rhetoric was basic to elite education in the ancient world (and probably from the end of the fifth century BCE); that rhetoric informs the prose and verse of our elite texts; that rhetoric was integral to social advancement; that rhetoric was an integral element of the furniture of the ancient elite mind. But how this undoubted influence is to be comprehended, and what the role of the rhetoric manuals is in relation to the practice of texts, is far less clear. Here the battle lines have been drawn up often in deeply aggressive opposition. Against the suggestion of Francis Cairns that genre is a time-free zone and that the third-century Menander Rhetor gives the rules by which we should understand Augustan and even Hellenistic poetry, critics have been quick to retort that it is simply crass to suggest that genres don't develop and change over time. Why should a third-century hack be anything but a crass guide to the profound poetry of Virgil and Ovid? The untenable rigidity of Cairns results in a brusque dismissal of the handbook of rhetoric, for all that critics might agree that rhetoric really, really matters.

So one particularly telling test-case for the relation between ancient rhetorical theory and cultural production is ekphrasis. It can be shown that the modern use of ekphrasis is indeed modern in as much as its restricted sense of "a description of a work of art" is a nineteenth-century coinage, broadly popular in Classics only in the last quarter of the twentieth century (as Webb neatly does). It can be shown too that ekphrasis in the rhetorical treatises is used largely to indicate a description full of enargeia, and conceived to be part of the battery of rhetorical weapons of an orator. So--misuse of ancient term and end of story? I don't think so. But before we move on to why this isn't the end of the story, let me say why this book will bring such arguments to a head.. ."

From an article by John Greene in CJ for 1909:

As for the Odes, when Horace thought so ill of a meter or of his success with it that he did not care to try it as many as three times in four books, we may well excuse our students from wrestling with it at all. This removes from special consideration twelve systems out of the nineteen essayed by our poet. This may seem rather drastic; almost any task might be made easy if twelve-nineteenths of it could be eliminated at the outset. But really the elimination is trivial. Including the "Secular Hymn," we have in the Odes a total of 3,I02 lines. The meters here disregarded include I76 lines, or less than 6 per cent. Of these, indeed, 96 are dactylic, leaving less than 3 per cent. not included in the present survey, or in the student's previous studies. Further, it is best not to harrow the feelings of our budding philologists by asking them to learn the names of all these strophes or systems. The Sapphic and the Alcaic are worth while. These terms are really distinctive, reminiscent of deathless names, and in universal use. The Asclepiad meters are differently styled in different books, and for that reason, if for no other, the entire traditional terminology may wisely be set aside.

From the OED:

   In Greek and Latin prosody: A verse, invented by Asclepiades, consisting of a spondee, two (or three) choriambi, and an iambus. Also attrib. Hence the adjs.: asclepiadic (also used subst.), asclepiadical, asclepiadean.

From Page's edition of the Odes and Epodes

horacemeterspage.pdf

To allow discussion and queries, I am creating a Horace blog in the U of M's faculty blog space.  So far the settings are public; I may go back and restrict this to students in the class, in which case you will have to log in to read and post.


Nita